In a blog post today, Google said it will make AI Overviews in Google Search available to users living in more than 100 countries. Google says people like AI Overviews, so the company plans to reach 1 billion users each month. Additionally, Google is adding support for more languages, meaning users in Japan can get AI-generated summaries in Japanese, for example.
If you aren’t familiar with AI Overviews by now, it’s a feature found in Google Search. Google’s Gemini AI model will generate a summary every time you search for something. This summary appears at the top of the page. Besides answering questions, it can also act as a meal planner, vacation organizer and brainstorming tool, among many other things.
This update follows several released over the last few months since the introduction of AI Overviews in May. The most recent update before this one allowed users to visit websites by clicking on links within the AI Overview text. Google says that this has resulted in a traffic increase to “supporting websites.” However, some publishers and sites fear that the overviews are destroying their traffic by being the first thing people see.
News like this isn’t surprising, as Google has been stuffing as much AI into Search as it can. AI Overviews have also generated some controversy after the AI told people to put glue on pizza. While that has been fixed, Google is preventing AI answers from appearing when users search for some subjects.